This is what your dessert options will look like if pollinators go extinct

In a Whole Foods in Fremont, California, the dessert
section is gutted. Shelves once filled with crème brulee,
chocolate chip cookies, and squares of tiramisu are empty now,
save for the occasional soy-based vegan “cheesecake” and coconut
macaroon.

This is not the casualty of an overzealous kids’ birthday party,
but the consequence of a large and pernicious trend: the decline
of pollinators. Shrinking populations of bees, butterflies, and
other species “is the most pressing biodiversity issue of our
time,” says Eric Mader, the pollinator program co-director for
The Xerces
Society, an organization dedicated to insect conservation.

The impact of pollinators, Mader says, is much broader than
people realize; the dessert aisle is just one tangible way to
illustrate it. The demonstration in the Fremont grocery store is
part of the Xerces Society and Whole Foods’ “Share the Buzz” campaign, designed to show
what our food system looks like without pollinators and engage
people with sustainable practices and conservation efforts.

The reality of pollinator decline, Mader says, is often
mistakenly conflated with the status of one particular species:
the honeybee. “There’s been no shortage of media around the decline of the
honeybee in recent years,” he says. New pests and parasites, loss
of habitat, and pesticide overuse, coupled with an aging
population of beekeepers, have resulted in a 50 percent reduction
in the population since the middle of the last century.

But despite these challenges, “the honeybee is relatively secure
from a global conservation standpoint,” Mader says. In the U.S.,
the honeybee isn’t one of the most crucial pollinators from an
economic standpoint, since it isn’t native to the country and it
didn’t co-evolve with some of the nation’s highest-value food
plants.

But native pollinators—which are more crucial to edible crops—are
succumbing to the same environmental factors shrinking the
more-publicized honeybee populations. “In North America, we have
roughly 4,000 species of wild bees,” Mader says. “They play an
incredibly important role in crop pollination, yet as a society
we know nothing about them and place very little value on the
species, despite the fact that they contribute billions of
dollars a year to our national economy.”

At this point in time, one in four bumblebees is at risk of
extinction. These bees, Mader says, are among our most
economically significant native wild pollinators. They pollinate
crops like blueberries and cherries early in the season, and
increase the yield of certain tomato plants by up to 30 percent.
“From a food security standpoint, their decline puts us in a
really vulnerable position,” Mader says.

Take, for example, that dessert aisle. Native pollinators play a
vital role in dairy production, fertilizing the clover seeds and
alfalfa seeds that feed livestock. They are also involved in the
production of oil stock like canola. “The absence of pollinators
would not only take the most delicious things out of our diet,
but also the most nutritionally significant parts as well,” Mader
says.

What’s especially troubling, Mader says, is a 300 percent
increase, over past 50 years, in global cropland that depends on
pollinator involvement. Around 85 percent of the plant species on
earth require the assistance of animals to grow; that comes out
to about one in every three bites of food taken.

The shrinking pollinator populations mirror a larger global loss:
the London Zoological Society estimates that 50 percent of all wildlife on earth has
disappeared over the past 40 years.

But in the case of disappearing bees and butterflies, this is not
a difficult problem to solve. “Every single person can create a
pollinator landscape in their own space,”
Mader says. Through the Xerces Society, he’s been involved with
developing pollinator habitats at airports; green building rooftops can provide
a similar platform. “There are all kinds of ways you can engineer
habitats into the built environment, as well as natural spaces,”
Mader says.

Honey
bees.AP

Even if your only garden is a flowerpot on a tiny city
balcony, there’s room to support these species. “Imagine if
every person in an apartment building plants a sunflower on the
balcony,” Mader says. “Suddenly that entire building is a field
of sunflowers. What an interesting and elegant solution to this
devastating issue.”

Read the original article on CityLab. Copyright 2016. Follow CityLab on Twitter.